People who drink three to four times a week are less likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those who never drink, Danish researchers suggest. Wine appears to be particularly beneficial, probably as it plays a role in helping to manage blood sugar, the study, published in Diabetologia, says. They surveyed more than 70,000 people on their alcohol intake - how much and how often they drank. But experts said this wasn't a "green light" to drink more than recommended. And Public Health England warned that consuming alcohol contributed to a vast number of other serious diseases, including some cancers, heart and liver disease. "People should keep this in mind when thinking about how much they drink," a spokeswoman said. Prof Janne Tolstrup, from the National Institute of Public Health of the University of Southern Denmark, who led the research, said: "We found that drinking frequency has an independent effect from the amount of alcohol taken. "We can see it's a better effect to drink the alcohol in four portions rather than all at once." After around five years, study participants were followed up and a total of 859 men and 887 women group had developed diabetes - either type 1 or the more common type 2. The researchers concluded that drinking moderately three to four times a week reduced a woman's risk of diabetes by 32% while it lowered a man's by 27%, compared with people drinking on less than one day a week. Findings also suggest that not all types of alcohol had the same effect. Wine appeared to be particularly beneficial because polyphenols, particularly in red wine, play a role in helping to manage blood sugar. © 2017 BBC.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23892 - Posted: 07.29.2017

By Karl Gruber Are you good with faces? So is the Japanese rice fish – at least, it is if the faces are the right way up. Just like humans, the tiny fish has no problem recognising faces orientated the usual way, but, again like us, it struggles when they are inverted. The finding indicates that the fish may have developed a unique brain pathway for face recognition, just as humans have. We have no problem identifying most objects in our environment – say, a chair – no matter what way up they are. But faces are different. It is relatively easy for us to spot the differences between two faces, even if they are physically similar, if we see them in photographs the right way up. But if the images are upside down, telling them apart gets a bit tricky. “This is because we have a specific brain area for processing faces, and when the face is upside down, we process the image through object processing pathways, and not the face-processing pathways any more,” says Mu-Yun Wang at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Until now, this face-inversion effect was considered exclusive to mammals as it has only been observed in primates and sheep. Enter the Japanese rice fish, also known as the medaka (Oryzias latipes), a 3.5-centimetre-long shoaling fish commonly found in rice paddies, marshes, ponds and slow-moving streams in East Asia. These fish are very social, so identifying the right individuals to associate with is important. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Evolution
Link ID: 23891 - Posted: 07.28.2017

Sarah Boseley Health editor Men who consume a lot of added sugar in drinks, cakes and confectionery run an increased risk of depression, according to a new study. Researchers from University College London (UCL) looked at sugar in the diet and common mental health problems in a very large cohort of 5,000 men and 2,000 women recruited for the Whitehall II study in the 1980s. Sugar tax must apply to sweets as well as drinks, say campaigners Read more They found a strong association between consuming higher levels of sugar and depression in men. Men with the highest intake – more than 67g a day – had a 23% increased chance of suffering a common mental disorder after five years than those who consumed the lowest levels of sugar – less than 39.5g. The researchers investigated whether men might be eating more sugary foods because they were depressed, but found that was not the case. Lead author Anika Knüppel, of the UCL Institute of Epidemiology and Health, said: “High sugar diets have a number of influences on our health but our study shows that there might also be a link between sugar and mood disorders, particularly among men. There are numerous factors that influence chances for mood disorders, but having a diet high in sugary foods and drinks might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Depression; Obesity
Link ID: 23890 - Posted: 07.28.2017

By Giorgia Guglielmi Tits amazing are birds Japanese. If you didn’t get that, you wouldn’t be alone: Humans figure out the meaning of sentences like this using grammatical rules such as word order. It turns out that Japanese tits, social birds that live in Japan and the Russian Far East, do it too. These wild birds respond to calls they’ve never heard before only if the chirps are in the right order, researchers report today in Current Biology. When a predator threatens the flock, Japanese tits produce something called a “mobbing call,” with the sequence ABC-D. By itself, the ABC part of the call means “danger.” But the D part of the call—similar to the “recruitment call” of a close relative, the willow tit—attracts flock members when there’s something to share, such as food. When the two parts are produced together, Japanese tits flock together to mob the intruder. To find out if the order of the calls mattered, researchers created a song that Japanese tits had never heard before—an artificial sequence made up of the Japanese tit’s ABC alert, followed by the willow tit’s recruitment call, tӓӓ. (You can listen to them, above.) They then played it from a loudspeaker for a flock of nearby tits. When Japanese tits heard the ABC- tӓӓ call, they turned their heads, looking for a predator, as they approached the loudspeaker. But when the artificial sequence was reversed (tӓӓ-ABC), the birds didn’t react. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 23889 - Posted: 07.28.2017

By Tara Bahrampour Older patients who become disoriented or confused after surgery are more than three times more likely to develop dementia later, a new study has found. The report, published Friday by the British Journal of Anaesthesia, assesses the effects of post-operative delirium (POD) on people 65 and older who were cognitively normal before their operations. Of 1,152 such patients, 9.5 percent met criteria for mild cognitive impairment or dementia a median of nine months after surgery. The frequency of being diagnosed with MCI or dementia after surgery was much higher – 33.3 percent – among those who had experienced post-operative delirium, compared with 9 percent among those who had not. While earlier studies have showed a relationship between POD and dementia, this is the first to look entirely at subjects who showed no cognitive decline in pre-surgery assessments, said David Warner, an anesthesiologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and the study’s senior author. Delirium is defined by an acute state of confusion, inattention, disorganized thinking, and a fluctuating mental state. Older patients are more likely than younger ones to develop it after surgery, as are people with lower education levels and those who undergo vascular procedures. Further study is needed to determine whether delirium contributes to later cognitive decline or is an indicator of some underlying factor that made people more likely to develop dementia, Warner said. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 23888 - Posted: 07.28.2017

By BENEDICT CAREY Dr. Herbert Needleman, whose studies of children exposed to low levels of lead prompted regulations that limited or banned the metal in a range of common products, like gasoline and paint, and set a standard for the modern study of environmental toxins, died on July 18 in Pittsburgh. He was 89. His son, Dr. Joshua Needleman, said the cause was lung failure resulting from edema, an excess of fluid. Dr. Needleman was working at a community psychiatric clinic in North Philadelphia after medical school when he met a young man who would become a touchstone for a crusading career. The boy approached Dr. Needleman and explained his ambitions, which were large, even as the boy struggled with words. He was bright and open; nonetheless he had deficits that struck Dr. Needleman as similar to those found in children with lead poisoning. “I thought, how many of these kids who are coming to the clinic are in fact a missed case of lead poisoning?” he said in a later interview. His clinic office overlooked a school playground; the view gave him an idea. Doctors had long known that exposure to high doses of lead caused mental lapses, even permanent brain damage and death. But what about the low-level exposure that many children, like the ones playing in the yard, absorbed every day — merely by living in older urban neighborhoods thick with lead paint and industrial contamination? No one knew. No one could study the effects carefully, because the available tests for lead exposure were of hair, blood, or fingernails — each flawed in its own way. Bone is the most accurate long-term repository: Once absorbed into the body, lead circulates in the blood and accumulates in the skeleton. But taking bone samples — biopsies — is painful and hardly justifiable for the sake of a hypothesis, especially in young children. Yet Dr. Needleman had seen an earlier study of lead poisoning, a small one, which measured accumulated lead exposure in teeth. Teeth are a part of the human skeleton. And young children shed them. “That was the insight that changed everything,” said Dr. Bernard Goldstein, former dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s graduate school of public health. “Herb became the Tooth Fairy.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23887 - Posted: 07.28.2017

By Mitch Leslie If these sweltering summer days prompt you to reach for a cold drink, you can thank your hypothalamus, a region of the brain that helps us regulate body temperature and other internal conditions. But the region may fail us when we get older. A new study in mice suggests that the hypothalamus promotes aging, hastening physical and mental decline as its stem cells die off. “It’s a pretty stunning paper,” says Charles Mobbs, a neuroendocrinologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. The new aging mechanism “is totally novel and quite unexpected,” adds neuroendocrinologist Marianna Sadagurski of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Tucked away deep in the brain, the hypothalamus monitors and maintains our blood concentration, our body temperature, and other physiological variables. Researchers have also suspected that it plays a role in aging. The hypothalamus becomes inflamed as we get older, and 4 years ago a team led by neurodendocrinologist Dongsheng Cai of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City showed that quelling this inflammation delays physical deterioration and boosts life span in mice. In the new study, the team turned its attention to the hypothalamus’s stem cells, which in young animals divide to produce replacements for dead and damaged cells. As mice get older, the scientists found, the number of stem cells in the hypothalamus plunges. By later ages they are “basically all gone,” Cai says. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Stem Cells
Link ID: 23886 - Posted: 07.27.2017

Sara Reardon Mice aged more slowly when injected with stem cells from the brains of newborns. Stem cells in the brain could be the key to extending life and slowing ageing. These cells — which are located in the hypothalamus, a region that produces hormones and other signalling molecules — can re­invigorate declining brain function and muscle strength in middle-aged mice, according to a study published on 26 July in Nature1. Previous studies have suggested that the hypothalamus is involved in ageing, but the latest research shows that stem cells in this region can slow the process. That makes sense, because the hypothalamus is involved in many bodily functions, including inflammation and appetite, says Dongsheng Cai, a neuroendocrinologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. In their study, Cai and his colleagues found that stem cells in the hypothalamus disappear as mice grow older. When the researchers injected their mice with viruses that destroy these cells, the animals seemed to grow older faster, experiencing declines in memory, muscle strength, endurance and coordination. They also died sooner than untreated mice of the same age. Next, the team injected stem cells taken from the hypothalami of newborn mice into the brains of middle-aged mice. After four months, these animals had better cognitive and muscular function than untreated mice of the same age. They also lived about 10% longer, on average. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Stem Cells
Link ID: 23885 - Posted: 07.27.2017

Sarah Zhang In 1958, Robert Monroe floated out of his body for the first time. It began “without any apparent cause,” he wrote. His doctor, finding no physical ailment, prescribed tranquilizers. A psychologist friend, meanwhile, told me him to try leaving his body again. After all, the friend said, “some of the fellows who practice yoga and those Eastern religions claim they can do it whenever they want to.” Monroe did try it again—and again and again. He recalls these experiences in his classic 1971 book Journeys out of the Body, which launched the phrase “out-of-body experiences” into the public conversation. Monroe died in 1995, but the fascination with out-of-body experiences endures. Out-of-body experience can vary person to person, but they often involve the sense of floating above one’s actual body and looking down. For neuroscientists, the phenomenon is a puzzle and an opportunity: Understanding how the brain goes awry can also illuminate how it is supposed to work. Neuroscientists now think that out-of-body experiences involve the vestibular system—made up of canals in the inner ear that track a person’s locations in space—and how that information gets integrated with other senses in the brain. In a recent study from France, Christophe Lopez, a neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université, teamed up with Maya Elzière, a doctor who sees patient with vestibular disorders. Some of these patients complained of dizziness, with physical causes that ranged from fluid leaking out of the inner ear to an infection of a nearby nerve. Of 210 patients who reported dizziness, 14 percent said they have had out-of-body experiences. In contrast, only 5 percent of healthy participants in the study reported such sensations. © 2017 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 23884 - Posted: 07.27.2017

By Diana Kwon Like humans, some golden retrievers develop Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a hereditary muscle wasting condition that begins early in life. Using gene therapy, scientists were able to restore muscle function in dogs with the disease, according to a study published today (July 25) in Nature Communications. Researchers injected microdystrophin, a shortened version of the dystrophin gene that individuals with DMD lack, into 12 dogs with the disease. The treatment led to improved muscle function in those animals for more than two years. “This preclinical study demonstrates the safety and efficacy of microdystrophin, and makes it possible to consider developing a clinical trial in patients,” study coauthor Caroline Le Guiner of the Université de Nantes in France, says in a statement. “Indeed, this is the first time that it has been possible to treat the whole body of a large-sized animal with this protein.” Scientists have also used CRISPR to correct the disease-causing mutations in mouse models of DMD and in the cells of a human patient with the condition. “This [study] is very encouraging, as current treatments for muscular dystrophy are merely palliative and patients are under constant medical care throughout their life,” John Counsell, a research associate at University College London who was not involved in the study, in a statement published by the Science Media Center. “Further preclinical trials will be required to show that this treatment can be effective in patients.” © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Muscles
Link ID: 23883 - Posted: 07.27.2017

Cells within an injured mouse eye can be coaxed into regenerating neurons and those new neurons appear to integrate themselves into the eye’s circuitry, new research shows. The findings potentially open the door to new treatments for eye trauma and retinal disease. The study appears in the July 26 issue of Nature, and was funded in part by the National Eye Institute (NEI), part of the National Institutes of Health. “The findings are significant because they suggest the feasibility of a novel approach for encouraging regeneration in the mammalian retina, the light sensitive tissue at the back of the eye that dies in many blinding diseases,” said Tom Greenwell, Ph.D., program director at NEI. “Importantly, the investigation also demonstrates that newly generated cells in the mouse retina not only look and behave like neurons, they also wire correctly to the existing neural circuitry at the back of the eye.” The study’s lead investigator, Tom Reh, Ph.D., and his team at UW Medicine in Seattle, looked to the zebrafish for clues about how to encourage regeneration in the mouse eye. When a zebrafish injures its eye, cells within the eye naturally regenerate, allowing the fish to maintain vision. Mammals lack this regenerative ability. In studying zebrafish the research team homed in on Müller glia, a type of retinal cell that supports the health and functioning of neighboring neurons, and that also exhibits an innate regenerative ability. Sometimes referred to as the stem cells of the zebrafish eye, Müller glia are the cells from which all other types of retinal cells are regenerated in the fish.

Keyword: Vision; Stem Cells
Link ID: 23882 - Posted: 07.27.2017

By Andrew Wagner Although it’s a far cry from the exosuits of science fiction, researchers have developed a robotic exoskeleton that can help stroke victims regain use of their legs. Nine out of 10 stroke patients are afflicted with partial paralysis, leaving some with an abnormal gait. The exosuit works by pulling cords attached to a shoe insole, providing torque to the ankle and correcting the abnormal walking motion. With the suit providing assistance to their joints, the stroke victims are able to maintain their balance, and walk similarly to the way they had prior to their paralysis, the team reports today in Science Translational Medicine. The exosuit is an adaptation of a previous design developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Warrior Web program, a Department of Defense plan to develop assistive exosuits for military applications. Although similar mechanical devices have been built in the past to assist in gait therapy, these were bulky and had to be kept tethered to a power source. This new suit is light enough that with a decent battery, it could be used to help patients walk over terrain as well, not just on a treadmill. The researchers say that although the technology needs long-term testing, it could start to decrease the time it takes for stroke patients to recover in the near future. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 23881 - Posted: 07.27.2017

By Joe Ward, Josh Williams and Sam Manchester Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist, has examined the brains of 202 deceased football players. A broad survey of her findings was published on Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Of the 202 players, 111 of them played in the N.F.L. — and 110 of those were found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., the degenerative disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head. C.T.E. causes myriad symptoms, including memory loss, confusion, depression and dementia. The problems can arise years after the blows to the head have stopped. The brains here are from players who died as young as 23 and as old as 89. And they are from every position on the field — quarterbacks, running backs and linebackers, and even a place-kicker and a punter. They are from players you have never heard of and players, like Ken Stabler, who are enshrined in the Hall of Fame. Some of the brains cannot be publicly identified, per the families’ wishes. The image above is from the brain of Ronnie Caveness, a linebacker for the Houston Oilers and Kansas City Chiefs. In college, he helped the Arkansas Razorbacks go undefeated in 1964. One of his teammates was Jerry Jones, now the owner of the Dallas Cowboys. Jones has rejected the belief that there is a link between football and C.T.E. The image above is from the brain of Ollie Matson, who played 14 seasons in the N.F.L. — after winning two medals on the track at the 1952 Helsinki Games. He died in 2011 at age 80 after being mostly bedridden with dementia, his nephew told The Associated Press, adding that Matson hadn’t spoken in four years. Dr. McKee, chief of neuropathology at the VA Boston Healthcare System and director of the CTE Center at Boston University, has amassed the largest C.T.E. brain bank in the world. But the brains of some other players found to have the disease — like Junior Seau, Mike Webster and Andre Waters — were examined elsewhere. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 23880 - Posted: 07.26.2017

Tom Goldman As the country starts to get back into its most popular professional team sport, there is a reminder of how dangerous football can be. An updated study published Tuesday by the Journal of the American Medical Association on football players and the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy reveals a striking result among NFL players. The study examined the brains of deceased former football players (CTE can only be diagnosed after death) and found that 110 out of 111 brains of those who played in the NFL had CTE. CTE has been linked to repeated blows to the head — the 2015 movie Concussion chronicled the discovery of CTE's connection to football. In the study, researchers examined the brains of 202 deceased former football players at all levels. Nearly 88 percent of all the brains, 177, had CTE. Three of 14 who had played only in high school had CTE, 48 of 53 college players, 9 of 14 semiprofessional players, and 7 of 8 Canadian Football League players. CTE was not found in the brains of two who played football before high school. According to the study's senior author, Dr. Ann McKee, "this is by far the largest [study] of individuals who developed CTE that has ever been described. And it only includes individuals who are exposed to head trauma by participation in football." © 2017 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 23879 - Posted: 07.26.2017

by Tom Siegfried Scientists pour a lot of brainpower into understanding how their experimental equipment works. You don’t want to be fooled into thinking you’ve made a great discovery because of some quirk in the apparatus you didn’t know about. Just the other day, a new paper published online suggested that the instruments used to detect gravitational waves exhibited such a quirk, tricking scientists into claiming the detection of waves that maybe weren’t really there. It appears that gravity wave fans can relax, though. A response to the challenge pretty much establishes that the new criticism doesn’t undermine the wave discoveries. Of course, you never know — supposedly well-established results sometimes do fade away. Often that’s because scientists have neglected to understand the most important part of the entire experimental apparatus — their own brains. It’s the brain, after all, that devises experiments and interprets their results. How the brain perceives, how it makes decisions and judgments, and how those judgments can go awry are at least as important to science as knowing the intricacies of nonbiotic experimental machinery. And as any brain scientist will tell you, there’s still a long way to go before understanding the brain will get crossed off science’s to-do list. But there has been progress. A recent special issue of the journal Neuron offers a convenient set of “perspective” papers exploring the current state of understanding of the brain’s inner workings. Those papers show that a lot is known. But at the same time they emphasize that there’s a lot we don’t know. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 23878 - Posted: 07.26.2017

By Virginia Morell Frogs, birds, monkeys, and humans make a variety of sounds expressing emotions. And because that ability is shared by every land-dwelling animal with a backbone, Charles Darwin argued that these cries have a common origin. Humans can recognize the emotions in the voices of other mammals, including cats and dogs. To find out whether we can also do this for nonmammals, scientists gathered recordings from nine species, including the hourglass tree frog (above), American alligator, common raven, Barbary macaque, and Tamil-speaking humans in two emotional states: highly and mildly aroused. They played the calls to 75 people—men and women who spoke English, German, or Mandarin—and asked them to judge whether the animal was very excited or subdued. You can try it yourself below: Participants easily passed the tests. Some 90% of listeners distinguished between the excited and calmer sounds of the tree frogs (which were calling for mates), and 87% scored the alligator calls correctly. Sixty-two percent were right about the ravens’ calls of alarm. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Emotions
Link ID: 23877 - Posted: 07.26.2017

By BENEDICT CAREY LONDON — England is in the midst of a unique national experiment, the world’s most ambitious effort to treat depression, anxiety and other common mental illnesses. The rapidly growing initiative, which has gotten little publicity outside the country, offers virtually open-ended talk therapy free of charge at clinics throughout the country: in remote farming villages, industrial suburbs, isolated immigrant communities and high-end enclaves. The goal is to eventually create a system of primary care for mental health not just for England but for all of Britain. At a time when many nations are debating large-scale reforms to mental health care, researchers and policy makers are looking hard at England’s experience, sizing up both its popularity and its limitations. Mental health care systems vary widely across the Western world, but none have gone nearly so far to provide open-ended access to talk therapies backed by hard evidence. Experts say the English program is the first broad real-world test of treatments that have been studied mostly in carefully controlled lab conditions. The demand in the first several years has been so strong it has strained the program’s resources. According to the latest figures, the program now screens nearly a million people a year, and the number of adults in England who have recently received some mental health treatment has jumped to one in three from one in four and is expected to continue to grow. Mental health professionals also say the program has gone a long way to shrink the stigma of psychotherapy in a nation culturally steeped in stoicism. “You now actually hear young people say, ‘I might go and get some therapy for this,’” said Dr. Tim Kendall, the clinical director for mental health for the National Health Service. “You’d never, ever hear people in this country say that out in public before.” A recent widely shared video of three popular royals — Prince William, Prince Harry and Kate, Dutchess of Cambridge — discussing the importance of mental health care and the princes’ struggles after their mother’s death is another sign of the country’s growing openness about treatment. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 23876 - Posted: 07.25.2017

/ By Ed Cara Ariella Cohen had already made nearly a dozen visits in as many months to a Philadelphia emergency room when, in the winter of 2014, she once again grabbed her pre-packed overnight bag and rushed to the hospital with crippling intestinal pain. She didn’t have high expectations: At just 26, she and her family had seen close to 100 doctors and amassed hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills attempting to identify and treat the source of her pain, and she arrived with a long-ago memorized script of the many diagnoses she had received since her childhood. As she sat on a gurney, Cohen recalls calmly explaining her situation to the attending physician. Like so many times before, her body was in mutiny: The assembly line of muscles along her gut had frozen, and she had been constipated for months, with the resulting pain sometimes scorching her insides. That day it had become so horrendous that she collapsed, prompting two of her regular doctors, fearing that the stoppage might tear a hole in her lower intestine, to advise she go to the ER immediately. According to Cohen, the ER physician that day simply dismissed her symptoms without an examination. If anything was wrong, he implied, it was mental, not physical, and he refused to admit her. Later that winter, during a raging snowstorm, her agony came again, but despite calling ahead to the ER and being told she could see another physician, the same doctor came around again as she was being examined and told her to go home. Copyright 2017 Undark

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 23875 - Posted: 07.25.2017

By Daisy Yuhas, When the shy, dark-haired boy met with clinicians for a full psychiatric evaluation two years ago, almost everything about him pointed to autism. W. had not spoken his first words until age 2. He was at least 4 before he could form sentences. As he got older, he was unable to make friends. He struggled to accept changes to his routine and maintain eye contact. And despite having an average intelligence quotient, he was unusually attached to objects; at age 11, he still lugged a bag of stuffed animals with him everywhere he went. But something else was clearly at work, too. “He had these things that he would call day dreams,” recalls Jennifer Foss-Feig, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. When she evaluated W., she noticed that he would often gaze into an empty corner of the room—particularly when he seemed to suspect that she wasn’t paying attention to him. (For privacy reasons, Foss-Feig declined to reveal anything but the child’s first initial.) Occasionally, he would speak to that space, as though someone else were there. His parents, she recalls, were worried. They explained to Foss-Feig that their son had what he called an “imaginary family.” But W.’s invisible playmates weren’t of the usual harmless variety that many children have; they seemed to be a dangerous distraction both at home and at school. On one occasion, he wandered through a busy parking lot, seemingly oblivious to the oncoming traffic. © 2017 Scientific America

Keyword: Autism; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 23874 - Posted: 07.25.2017

By Aylin Woodward Keep your head up. Today, navigating the urban jungle can be challenging, with uneven sidewalks and errant kerbs presenting obstacles to easy walking. So why do we rarely trip up even though we hardly ever give walking our full attention? It seems that all we need is a brief glimpse of what’s coming next on the road in front of us, just one step ahead of time, to keep up upright. Humans have a unique kind of locomotion – we’re bipedal, meaning we move around on two legs rather than four. Scientists are still struggling to unravel the mystery behind our shift to two legs – for instance, some suggest it freed up our hands to carry food. Others point out that our human gait is much more energetically efficient. Our walking style exploits external forces like gravity and inertia to use as little muscular energy as possible so that we actually fall forward onto the lifted foot with each step. Jonathan Samir Matthis at the University of Texas at Austin wanted to know how we aim and control this forward motion – particularly since the way ahead is rarely level and obstacle-free. “We have to be much more careful about where we place our feet than we would if we had four legs on the ground,” he says. “Because if we do it wrong, there’s serious consequences like breaking your leg.” © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Attention
Link ID: 23872 - Posted: 07.25.2017